1. The Field of the Invention
Many industrial applications utilize solvents, thinners, lacquers, and other expensive fluids whose useful life is shortened due to such fluids becoming dirty and carrying along dirt, contaminants such as paint, grit, dirt, metallic or paint chips and the like. The industrial user of such liquids often lacks the facilities to inexpensively and safely clean these often volatile fluids periodically and safely. The present invention and provides a mechanism which permits industrial and commercial users to store the liquids that are being cleaned in the same device that cleans them, as well as providing a place for the clean liquid to be stored, ready for use.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The prior art abounds with filtering devices. U.S. Pat. No. 2,605,901, issued Aug. 5, 1952 to S. O. Morrison, et al, teaches a filter for removable cartridges employing a tubular-like casing and having therewithin a removable cartridge utilizing gravel, asbestos, carbon and sand in succession, starting at the top of the cartridge where the gravel is located and through which area the input liquid is diverted. The bottom of the filter, adjacent the sand end thereof, communicates the interior of the tubular housing which carries the filtered material outwardly through an exit tube. Here the fluid to be filtered must be brought to the filter which will permit the liquid to be filtered at a rate purely dependant upon the force of gravity and the resistance of the filter to accommodate the passage of the fluid to be cleaned. Once the liquid is introduced to the filter it will unrestrainedly traverse the filter medium, limited only by the resistance of the filter medium, thus passing the fluid through the filter at a rapid rate. This tends to compel the particulates, of the fluid to be cleaned, to find their way rapidly through the spaces separating the particles of carbon, sand, or gravel in the filter and to cause tractways.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,633,990, issued Apr. 7, 1953 to A. J. Simpson, et al., disclosed a filter in which the inner cartridge-like device, comprising a vertical casing holding a filtering medium, is disposed within an outermost housing adapted to receive and store cleaned fluid therewithin. The Simpson teaching recognizes the difficulty encountered in the fluid passing through the filter at such a rate so as to cause channels which decrease the filtering effect. The disclosure teaches means to minimize same.
R. V. Brink disclosed, in the U.S. Pat. No. 3,204,770, issued on Sept. 7, 1965, a portable water softener which introduces water within the central passageway of an annular filter. The water courses through the filter emerging on the cylindrical sides to be captured within an overall housing communicating from the sides of the filter downwardly to an exit port in the outermost housing. Here the fluid to be cleaned passes through the wall of the annular filter and immediately emerges outwardly from the filter in a one-pass operation. The water when first introduced to the filter is exposed to its smaller surface area (at its innermost cylindrical surface). Hence, the velocity here is at its highest, where the coarsest particles are intended to be filtered out. As the fluid emerges outwardly toward the cylindrical outermost surface of the annular filter, each particle is traveling at a slower velocity, coming into contact with more surface area than the liquid as initially introduced to the filter. The heavier particles have a tendency to quickly clog up the interior cylindrical surface of the filter. Once the clogging process commences, there is less area left for the fluid to course through and resulting in an ever increasing tendency for clogging.